BuddyPress.org

Glad you found and shared a temporary workaround. This was also brought up in another topic recently, and Andy said “In the first version for the end of the year, BuddyPress will only support open networks. However, the plan is to put together a generic privacy component which can be used by all components to restrict and allow customizable privacy levels.”.

Privacy isn’t built in yet but it will be soon enough.